Down Adela's Alley

The facts of the matter were few, and sordid, and readily lent themselves to scareheads: somebody bludgeoned the Walter Overells aboard their cruiser in Newport bay, Calif, and blew up the boat, and the Overells with it, by a charge of dynamite rigged to an alarm clock. From the moment the cops picked up 18-year-old Daughter Beulah Louise Overell and her boy friend, Los Angeles newspapers had a field day.

In their jail cells, sullen, bushy-browed Beulah and George ("Bud") Gollum, 21, an ex-Navy radioman, peppered each other with love letters full of double and triple entendres. Hearst's Examiner got hold of them, ran off 200 copies of a dummy final edition without them to lull the rival Times, then spread the letters over two pages.

Neither the Republicans' labor bill nor the Communist coup in Hungary got such space in the Examiner as Beulah and Bud. The Los Angeles press invaded suburban Santa Ana in force, with 30-odd reporters, photographers and such trained seals as Mystery Writer Craig Rice (later fired), Screenwriter Niven (Duel in the Sun) Busch, and Adela Rogers St. Johns.

"Contact With Reality." The greatest of these, and the oldest (53) hand at the game was Adela. The Hearst people had drafted her to give the Overell story the cozy, corny touch she had applied to the Lindbergh and Weyerhaeuser kidnapings, the birth of the Dionne quintuplets, the death of Rudy Valentino. Hearst papers the U.S. over spread her words in big type. Excerpts:

"I came to see whether these two of our children could be guilty of such a crime and if so were we, as a civilization, guilty too. Or to see if some touchstone of truth guards and protects their very youth. . . . But the first thing that freezes you in your chair ... is that there is no youth in them. . . ."

What Beulah needed, Adela decided, was her mother: "Someone who could say to her, 'Louise . . . you ought not to sit there in a bright, striped blue-green dress with your arms bare to the shoulder . . . your arms aren't your best point . . . they look too strong.' "

Sweeping Thought. After eight days of thoughts like these, Adela pleaded with her readers to bear with her: "These are the doldrums of jury selection. . . . Through the jammed courtroom you can feel a thought sweeping. What are we doing here? What's the matter with our world . . .? What's the matter with everybody?" Whatever was the matter with the rest of the world, things would presumably look up for Adela, as soon as Beulah and Bud took the stand.

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